Suffused with the spirit of the ’60s, Tramontano’s is a warm and engaging debut.
An affirming story of sisterhood and second chances in the 1960s and ’70s.
When the love of Lisa Stern’s life dies in a car accident, she’s left to pick up the pieces of her shattered life. Though she’s a smart, attractive and self-possessed 20-something, without her longtime boyfriend (and one-time college professor), Mac, Lisa loses herself—and her ability to cope. The novel begins with Lisa’s journey out of Boston to Cape Cod, where she finds solace in the company of a widowed Portuguese baker. The two women’s unlikely friendship allows Lisa to begin to make sense of her loss and inspires her to open a women’s community center to help others get back on their feet. With a new plan, and her best friend from Boston, a hard-edged single mother, in tow, Lisa returns to her hometown of Albany, N.Y., and to the overbearing Jewish family she fled years earlier. Mimicking the alogical structure of grief, much of the narrative is nonlinear: scenes of Lisa and Mac’s romance, her budding friendships in college, as well as her political awakening in the early 1960s, are interspersed carefully throughout—Tramontano has quite a knack for introducing new information from the back story in order to inform the reader's understanding of what’s happening in the present. The book leans on a few clunky devices—a dead grandmother who frequently gives advice from the other side—and the writing is sometimes hokey and heavy-handed: “The ocean gleams sapphire”; rooms are “hungry for life”; and women are prone to “silently [scream] into the black night.” Tramontano’s writerly strength lies in her characters. More often than not—and there are a lot of them—characters are complicated, flawed and believable. Tramontano portrays Lisa’s troubled relationship with the architect assigned to work on the women’s center in Albany particularly adroitly, using it to reveal that Lisa’s perfect lost love might not have been so perfect after all.
Suffused with the spirit of the ’60s, Tramontano’s is a warm and engaging debut.Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2011
ISBN: 978-1463520250
Page Count: 304
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Downbeat but often engaging poems and stories.
A slim volume of largely gay-themed writings with pessimistic overtones.
Poe (Simple Simon, 2013, etc.) divides this collection of six short stories and 34 poems into five sections: “Art,” “Death,” “Relationship,” “Being,” and “Reflection.” Significantly, a figurative death at the age of 7 appears in two different poems, in which the author uses the phrase “a pretended life” to refer to the idea of hiding one’s true nature and performing socially enforced gender roles. This is a well-worn trope, but it will be powerful and resonant for many who have struggled with a stigmatized identity. In a similar vein, “Imaginary Tom” presents the remnants of a faded relationship: “Now we are imaginary friends, different in each other’s thoughts, / I the burden you seek to discard, / you the lover I created from the mist of longing.” Once in a while, short story passages practically leap off of the page, such as this evocative description of a seedy establishment in Lincoln, Nebraska: “It was a dimly lit bar that smelled of rodent piss, with barstools that danced on uneven legs and made the patrons wonder if they were drunker than they thought.” In “Valéry’s Ride,” Poe examines the familial duties that often fall to unmarried and childless people, keeping them from forming meaningful bonds with others. In this story, after the double whammy of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hits Louisiana, Valéry’s extended family needs him more than ever; readers will likely root for the gay protagonist as he makes the difficult decision to strike out on his own. Not all of Poe’s main characters are gay; the heterosexual title character in “Mrs. Calumet’s Workspace,” for instance, pursues employment in order to escape the confines of her home and a passionless marriage. Working as a bookkeeper, she attempts to carve out a space for herself, symbolized by changes in her work area. Still, this story echoes the recurring theme of lives unlived due to forces often beyond one’s control.
Downbeat but often engaging poems and stories.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5168-3693-2
Page Count: 120
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A volume of poetry that shines when focused on the author’s experiences of race and culture.
A collection speaks in part to the poet’s Mexican-American heritage.
In these multifaceted poems, Mexico-born, Houston-raised Salazar (Of Dreams and Thorns, 2017) explores general human themes like love and war in addition to specific experiences as a person of color. The book begins with a sensual meditation on desire, featuring luscious descriptions of a lover, from lips “moist like youth” to the body’s “softest velvet” slopes. The poems shift to odes to cultural icons like the Tejano star Selena and Mexican-German painter Frida Kahlo as well as occasion pieces honoring his brother’s 40th birthday and a friend’s mother’s memorial service. The author hits his stride when he delves into identity. In “I Am Not Brown,” he contemplates the societal implications of skin tone and his inability to fit into the rigid category of Caucasian or Latino. “For white and black and brown alike / Are slaves to history’s brush strokes,” he writes. “Grateful for the Work,” perhaps Salazar’s loveliest poem, catalogs the day of a laborer, starting with an early morning awakening and following him as he toils in 100-degree heat, enjoys tacos from his lunch pail, buys beverages from a child’s lemonade stand, and returns home to an equally hard-working wife. The author then makes an abrupt turn toward Syria in a series of poems that condemn that country’s president, Bashar Hafez al-Assad. They serve as a rallying cry for Syrians and grieve for the murdered masses. Salazar’s closing poem, “Sons of Bitches,” is a clunky rant about a 20-year-old immigrant shot in the head by a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent. The gratuitous violence and political theologizing are ill at ease with the intimate, personal experiences that preceded them, such as the fablelike “A Mexican is Made of This,” in which Salazar beautifully describes the “rainbows, bronze, backbone, butterflies” that his people embody.
A volume of poetry that shines when focused on the author’s experiences of race and culture.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9991496-3-8
Page Count: 166
Publisher: Bronze Diamond Productions
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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